Nature restores a blackened dream

Mark Baker

THERE was a moment when Esther Leahy thought all was lost. She had faced the inferno for more than an hour and, with strength she had never known, cast off a huge burning branch that had crashed onto the front deck. But still the fire pressed in.

After being thrown to the ground by a fierce gust of heat, Esther sounded the big dinner gong - the agreed signal to call others to her rescue. But no one came. How could they have heard the gong above that deafening roar?

Despairing, she ran inside and threw herself into the lap pool - the refuge of last resort, prepared with a steel covering frame in case the roof collapsed. But after a few moments, she realised that giving up was not an option.

She had a pact with her husband and their friend, who were still out there fighting the fire. She had to keep defending her end of the house, her part of the bargain, however impossible it seemed.

''I crawled out of the pool and headed back out to the fire again,'' she says. ''But at that point I thought we'd lost it, and I thought both of the men must be dead.''

Six years before the Black Saturday blaze, friends of Sean and Esther Leahy had found a piece of land at Koornalla, south of Traralgon, in Gippsland. It was cradled by a languid sweep of Traralgon Creek and surrounded by hills cloaked in towering native trees.

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The couple knew at once this was the place to create their own private Eden, a dream they had nursed for years. They named it Tambreet, the indigenous name for the platypus found in their bend of the creek.

There was little there when they arrived - a paddock where cows had once grazed, now overgrown with rough grasses and thickets of blackberries. There were a few gums, a scattering of other trees and a small clutch of poplars down by the creek.

But they already had a grand vision for the place. ''We'll plant a sweep of green lawn to position the house, and - god forbid - protect from fire,'' Esther would write. ''We'll spot the lawns and fill the gardens with exotic specimens, trees of antiquity, trees of autumn brilliance, trees of Australia, and trees from around the world.''

And so they did.

They created a lake and planted a forest glade. They built their house and surrounded it with sweeps of lawn interwoven with a rich profusion of trees, plants and flower beds. They added an orchard, an olive grove and an abundant vegetable garden.

Tambreet became a vast private botanical garden with more than 300 species, native and exotic, and many subspecies, including 20 varieties of maple.

Sean had been obsessed with trees since childhood visits to Sherbrooke in the Dandenongs.

''They give us everything we need - building materials, food, even the petroleum came from trees. And they are immensely satisfying, emotionally,'' he says.

As the days before Black Saturday gathered with menacing portent in 2009, the Leahys were never in doubt they would stay and defend what they had so lovingly created.

Their fire plan had been prepared and rehearsed exhaustively. They had cleared everything flammable from around the house, and had been soaking the lawns for days. They had ample water in concrete tanks set higher up the hill behind the house, with good pressure and plastic pipes buried to protect them from heat. They reckoned it would take three adults to defend the house, and two of their sons were on standby to join them.

''We knew by mid-afternoon all hell was breaking loose,'' Sean says. ''We had seen the smoke, and we knew we were in line for it.''

Late in the afternoon, their friend Peter Dell dropped by to check on them as the fire, lit by an arsonist in a pine forest near Churchill that morning, raced towards Koornalla across a 60-kilometre front. They assured him they were ready and that their sons were on their way.

Peter quickly gathered their wedding photos, documents and other personal effects to take to safety in town, wished them luck and left. A short time later, he made a decision that almost certainly saved their lives, and imperilled his.

As he was driving out of Koornalla, the smoke, heat and howling winds closed in. He realised it was too late for the Leahys' sons to get past the roadblock up on the Princes Highway, and police were about to close the road into Koornalla. So he turned around and headed back to Tambreet, where he stayed and fought the fire with Sean and Esther to the end.

Sean remembers little of that night. The intensity, the enormity of it, wiped his powers of recall. Instead, just fleeting snapshots of the terror remain.

''We were watching this fireball on the hill, and seconds later it was all around us,'' he says. ''The wind was like a tornado. I was surprised the roof didn't go. But I was more concerned about all my work going up in smoke. I was so angry. We had done so much, and it was all being destroyed.''

At the height of the battle, he was weighed down by the knowledge it had been his call for them to stay and fight the flames. ''I felt I had the responsibility for the lives of two other human beings, and we could hear other houses exploding around us.''

Of the 30 or so houses in Koornalla, only six survived. The Leahys' nearest neighbours perished - a couple, their son and a visiting teenage friend. The bare concrete slab where that house once stood is one of the few obvious signs that remains of that terrible night.

The fire destroyed almost everything at Tambreet except the house. The magnificent gardens were mostly reduced to a smouldering landscape of tree stumps and ash.

But the Leahys' unorthodox response to the disaster was to affirm their faith in the power and abundance of nature - and to create an important resource for others who face the daunting challenge of rebuilding their natural environment after a devastating bushfire.

The Leahys' initial reaction to their loss and the blackness that shrouded their valley and their emotions was the same as that of most of their neighbours: wipe the slate and start again. ''People don't want to look at the blackness, so they clear everything,'' Esther says.

But they were aware of the unfashionable advice given decades earlier by celebrated landscape designer Edna Walling, who chided people for the practice of bulldozing gardens after bushfires. ''Wait, be patient, give nature time to right itself, watch and assist,'' Walling urged.

Friends who had seen startling evidence of plant recovery on sites abandoned after the 1983 Ash Wednesday fires at Mount Macedon also encouraged them to experiment: ''Wait four years and see what happens,'' they said.

And so the Leahys waited, watched and began to record what they observed - in words and a photographic archive that grew to more than 8000 images. That work has now been gathered in a book, launched at a celebration in the gardens of Tambreet last weekend.

''So little has been written about tree recovery in Australia,'' Esther says. ''We are amateur botanists - we don't have any formal qualifications, but we just decided to document this.

''We have made observations about what's happened. The conclusions are for others.''

In the end, most of the garden came back to life, and the Leahys kept their interventions to a minimum. Some species are flourishing more than before the fire.

''Tambreet's survival and regrowth has astounded us - from the smallest perennials … to huge gums and oaks, with coppice growth and resilience,'' Sean has written. ''Of course the regrowth was not total, and many sad gaps have been filled with new planting, but it is astounding to realise new visitors to Tambreet see no evidence of our cherished garden's encounter with the fire.''

The recovery has gone well beyond the 2.5 hectares of Tambreet. A community effort has gone into planting thousands of trees along the roadsides and the banks of the creek, including mountain ash, blue gums and wattles. A six-hectare patch of blackberry-infested council land has been turned into a park dotted with native and exotic trees, and with a chestnut grove along one boundary.

Before the fire, the Leahys commissioned a wing of Tambreet as a medical retreat - Sean is a dermatologist - and they opened the grounds for weddings. Now they hope to revive these enterprises.

''We're lucky - we survived and we got our gardens back,'' Esther says. But the Leahys are mindful of how arbitrary such good fortune can be. At the end of the book, Esther writes: ''We know many other Victorians had a comprehensive fire plan, the house and garden prepared against fire, and many also stayed to fight, but in the end they lost the battle against a fire whose might was beyond measure.''

■ Round the Bend, the Creation, Destruction by Fire and Recovery of Tambreet Gardens is available online at tambreetretreat.com.au.